Telecommunication networks have long been employed to facilitate communication between users who are geographically dispersed. Communication may include transmission of data packets, such as media and voice packets, between a plurality of network devices, such as routers and switches. In today society, a company may depend upon its network to be fully functionally in order to conduct business. Thus, a company may monitor its network in order to ensure reliable performance, enable fault detection, and detect unauthorized activities.
Monitoring may be performed by connecting network taps to the networks to gather information about the data traffic in order to share the information with monitoring tools. However, conventional network taps may employ a store-and-forward technique that may cause delay in the network traffic, thereby creating communication latency. In addition, since data traffic may flow into a port of a network device in a bidirectional manner, full-duplex monitoring may require a second network interface card (NIC). Besides increasing the cost of monitoring, a second NIC may cause the configuration of the monitoring system to become more complex and less flexible.